Seeing is believing. Then what?

Earth from Space
First photo of the whole Earth forever changed the way we see our planet, NASA

Perhaps one of the most powerful images of all time, the first photo of the whole Earth, taken November 10, 1967, has had a significant impact on human consciousness. Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, had these observations about the image:

[It was] motivating for a lot of people, because it gave the sense that Earth is an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green, and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum. Islands know about limitations. Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] led me to this notion. He said people still think the earth is flat because they act as if its resources are infinite. But that photograph showed otherwise…. This is all we’ve got and we’ve got to make it work. There’s no backup. (Massive Change Radio, March 2, 2004)

After this image achieved wide-scale circulation, Earth Day was founded and gained a broad political following, enlisting support from all kinds of people who are moved by both the limitations and the uniqueness of our planet.

Space Debris
Tracking the junk orbiting our Earth
Aerospace Corporation

There are nearly ten thousand man-made objects larger than a softball in Earth orbit. Of these, only seven percent are operational satellites. The remaining ninety-three percent consists of dead satellites, rocket fragments and debris. While these objects are generally very far apart, their presence and great velocity can potentially interfere with space missions and even threaten the lives of astronauts - a tiny speck of paint from a satellite once dug a quarter-inch hole in a space shuttle window. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has been tracking these objects since 1961. Today, before every critical launch, analysts perform a collision avoidance test to make sure the mission will not cross paths with any of these objects.

Earth’s Protective Ozone
The ozone hole
NASA, Ozone Processing Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

In 1983 scientists noticed strangely low levels of ozone, the layer of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation. They began to produce visualizations that showed an alarming ozone “hole” over the South Pole. These images were key to gaining the attention of the scientific community, the public and governments. By revealing that the ozone was being affected by emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from aerosol cans, refrigerators and air conditioners, these images mobilized action worldwide that led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty to eliminate CFC production and consumption. Between 1986 and 1997, global production of CFCs dropped by eighty-five percent, a significant victory for the environment, and proof of the power of visualization.

Ocean Circulation
Analyzing currents warns us of the effects of large-scale climate change
Earth Simulator Center / Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)

The Earth Simulator, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, simulates global environmental changes by analyzing the Earth with detail more than a thousand times greater than previous super-computers. The computer makes new predictive models based on analysis of past ocean current cycles. Since these currents have the ability to greatly alter global climate, we can use the new models toward more precise predictions of weather and irregular climatic trends such as global warming. As global warming causes polar glaciers to melt, altering ocean currents, our ability to foresee possible results of such a phenomena will help us understand the implications.

Air Traffic
Visualizing air traffic in real-time permits greater efficiency
NAV CANADA, made with ETMS software

This is a still from a visualization shows one full day of air traffic over North America, each yellow dot representing one plane. Viewing air traffic in this way reveals that this complex, seemingly unpredictable and variable system is in fact nearly-perfectly structured. The success and the seamless nature of the global air traffic system are rooted in an effectively designed information sharing system that requires rigorous communication between airlines, beyond ordinary language.

Increasingly, air traffic controllers are using Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) software to retrieve real-time, automated information about the distribution of aircraft in the skies. Developed by the US Federal Aviation Administration, ETMS is made available to countries with a high volume of air traffic. Each country that implements the system automatically shares its data with all other users, effectively creating a real-time image of global air traffic. Such advanced information-sharing technology permits greater efficiency, allowing the industry’s infrastructure to keep up with rapidly increasing air travel.

Global Internet
A network of networks serving the world’s information needs
Barrett Lyon, The Opte Project

In computing, a network is an interconnected group of machines. The Internet is a vast network of networks, all able to communicate with each other. This map of the Internet shows the hardware that serves as the “skeleton” or infrastructure of the Internet. The colors indicate geographic location. Despite its obvious complexity, this map represents just a fraction of the whole network - the rest is simply impossible to accurately represent. The structure of the Internet is constantly changing, not surprising when you consider its continued growth, with more than 24 million additional host computers added in 2002 alone. Fortunately, unlike many systems, the Internet’s extreme interconnectedness is designed to be extraordinarily resistant to problems stemming from malfunction, war or natural disaster. When any part of the system fails, data is simply re-routed through a different path.

Earthquakes
Terrestrial tremors large and small reveal an Earth that is never at rest
Sensorium (www.sensorium.org)

Each year the Earth experiences around three million quakes, ninety-nine percent of them so minor that they are almost undetectable. By the late 1950s we had an earthquake observation network mature enough to detect nearly every earthquake and to begin sharing data globally. More recently, an international university research group founded the Global Seismographic Network (GSN). It has more than 130 recording stations distributed evenly over the Earth’s surface, gathering real-time data that is shared freely and openly with the international community via the Internet.

This is a still from a video which shows worldwide earthquakes during 1997 data - greatly exaggerated for clarity.

Precipitation
Averting droughts and floods with supercomputer
Earth Simulator Center / Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)

This snapshot of the most detailed model of global atmosphere ever produced is all in a day’s work for one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Created by the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center in Japan, the system occupies the space of four tennis courts and is five times faster than any major US military machine. The supercomputer performs over 35 trillion calculations per second to create projections of atmospheric features so realistic they resemble actual satellite feeds. Its powers of prediction are leading the way to improvements in water resource management, planning for droughts and floods, and weather forecasting.

Gravity
Analyzing gravity to understand changes in Earth’s systems NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Gravity, the omnipresent force that keeps us anchored to the ground, is not distributed equally around the world. This map is an exaggerated view of small variations in gravity due to the amount or density of matter beneath the Earth’s crust. The purple regions represent areas of low gravity while orange shows the highest. By taking continuous measurements of Earth’s gravitational field, we can detect subtle changes in Earth’s systems such as ocean circulation and magma movement in order to better understand our planet.

High-Resolution Remote Sensing
Universal access to satellite images leads to greater global transparency
NASA, Scientific Visualization Studio with Space Imaging (IKONOS)

By combining data from three Earth-orbiting satellites (MODIS, Landsat 7, and IKONOS), NASA is able to simulate the experience of seamlessly zooming from outer space towards Earth’s surface until we can see objects as small as one metre in size. The most detailed images come from IKONOS, which zips around Earth in a 423-mile-high orbit and is able to “see” the same place every three days.

Until recently these images were only available to select military and intelligence personnel, but today anyone with sufficient funds can buy high resolution images of anywhere in the world. Some see the universal availability of these images as a direct threat to security, while others see a much-needed move to worldwide transparency. The images are used for many purposes from military mapping to disaster management, from urban planning to combating the illegal drug trade.

Earth at Night
Worldwide illumination offers a window on energy use
NOAA, National Geophysical Data Center with data from US Air Force Weather Agency

Observing the Earth at night gives us new perspective on worldwide access to electricity, and on population density in developed regions. National borders of North Korea and Israel are clearly depicted and human preference for settlement on transportation routes is obvious along the Nile River and Trans-Siberian rail line. The dark areas can be deceiving, because densely populated poor nations with low energy consumption are not visible. This visualization represents four primary types of light: human settlements (white), fires (orange), gas burnoff from oil wells (green), and heavily-lit fishing boats (cyan). The orange bands of fire that cover parts of Africa, Asia and Australia are the result of agricultural activity and natural causes. The extent of these fires is exaggerated because they occurred over the course of a full year - a single satellite orbited the Earth 2190 times to make this image.

Tree of Life
Evolutionary relationships among three thousand species
David M. Hillis and Derrick Zwickl, University of Texas at Austin

Genetic evidence suggests that all living organisms evolved from a common ancestral species that lived on the Earth billions of years ago. This diagram depicts the relationships among approximately three thousand species of bacteria, plants, fungi and animals, based on an analysis of their ribosomal RNA genes.

A fundamental objective of biology is to produce an accurate tree of life for the world’s 1.7 million known species. Understanding and reconstructing their evolution provides insights into behaviour, physiology and molecular development. Using powerful computers, we can reconstruct the history of a virus such as influenza or HIV, determine its origins, and use this information to help predict the course of an epidemic or develop potential vaccines. Download the tree of life image for yourself from David Hillis’s Laboratory website.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.